Xi Jinping To Leave China For First Time In Over 2 Years Amid Covid, Meet Vladimir Putin

Xi Jinping will leave China this week for the first time in more than two years for a trip to Central Asia where he will meet Vladimir Putin only a month before Xi is ready to strengthen his place as the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.
The journey, first abroad since the beginning of Pandemi Covid-19, showed how confident Xi about his grip on power in China and how dangerous the global situation had become: Russian confrontation with the West of Ukraine, the crisis ended Taiwan and the stuttering global economy.

XI will be in a state visit to Kazakhstan on Wednesday and then will meet Putin at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Summit in the City of Silk Road Samarkand in Uzbekistan, according to Kazakhstan and Kremlin.

Putin’s foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters last week that Putin was expected to meet XI at the Summit. Kremlin refused to provide details about the substance of the conversation. China has not confirmed Xi’s travel plan.

The meeting will give President XI the opportunity to underline its influence while Putin can show Russia’s slope on Asia; Both leaders can show their opposition to the United States just as the West is trying to punish Russia for the Ukraine War.

“This is all about Xi in my view: he wants to show how sure he is domestically and seen as an international leader of the nation who opposes Western hegemony,” said George Magnus, author of “Red Flags”, a book about XI’s challenges.

“Personally I imagine Xi would be the most anxious about how Putin’s war was running and indeed if Putin or Russia played a role in several points in the near future because China still needed anti-West leadership in Moscow.”

Russia suffered the worst defeat in the war last week, leaving its main fortress in the northeast Ukraine.

The “no limit” partnership is deeper between the increase in the super Chinese and Titan Russian natural resources is one of the most interesting geopolitical developments from the last few years – and one west watching with anxiety.

As for the senior partner in the global communist hierarchy, Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is now considered a junior partner of a Rising Chinese communist who is expected to overtake the United States as the largest economy in the world in the next decade.

Although historical contradictions are abundant in partnerships, there is no sign that Xi is ready to provide support for Putin in the most serious Russian confrontation with the West since the peak of the Cold War.

Conversely, two leaders aged 69 years are getting deeper. Trading jumped almost a third between Russia and China in the first 7 months of 2022.

Xi Supreme

XI is widely expected to decide with a precedent at the Communist Party Congress which began on October 16 and secure the leadership of the third five years.

While Xi has met Putin 38 times since becoming president of China in 2013, he has not met Joe Biden directly since the last president of the U.S. in 2021.

The last XI met Putin in February only a few weeks before the Russian president ordered the Ukraine invasion of which made tens of thousands of people died and sprinkled chaos through the global economy.

At the meeting at the opening of the Winter Olympiad, Xi and Putin stated that the partnership was “no restrictions”, supporting the deadlock in Ukraine and Taiwan with a promise to collaborate more against the West.

China has refrained from condemning Russian operations against Ukraine or calling it “invasion” in line with the Kremlin which made war a “special military operation”.

“A bigger message is actually not that Xi supports Putin, because it is clear that Xi supports Putin,” said Professor Steve Tsang, Director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and Africa Studies in London.

“The greater signal is that he, Xi Jinping, will come out of China for the first time since Pandemi ahead of the party congress. If there will be a smelting of him, this is when the smelting will occur. And he is clearly convinced that the smelting will not occur because he is located abroad. “

Xi, the son of a communist revolutionary, is ready to secure the term historical leadership in the 20th Communist Party Congress which began on October 16. He last left China in January 2020, before the world entered Covid Lockdown.

Kremlin Chief

After the West imposed the most severe sanctions in Moscow in modern history because of the war in Ukraine, Putin said Russia turned to Asia after centuries seeing the West as a place for economic, technology and war growth.

Throwing the west as a coalition that was passed down and dominated by U.S. Which aims to shackle-or even destroy-Russia, Putin’s world view with XI, who presents China as an alternative to the command of the two second wars led by the US.

Putin Aide Ushakov said the Xi-Putin meeting would be “very important”. He did not give further details.

When Europe tries to turn away from Russian energy imports, Putin will try to increase energy exports to China and Asia.

He will also hold a three-way Russia-Chinese Summit with Mongolia-Rute which has the potential to be much shorter for Russian energy from Western Siberia to China.

He said last week that the main gas export route to China through Mongolia was agreed upon. Gazprom has been studying the possibility for years for new gas pipes – Siberian strength 2 – to travel through Mongolia carrying Russian gas to China.

This will carry 50 billion cubic meters of gas per year, about one third of what is usually sold by Europe- or equivalent to the annual volume of Nord Stream 1.

The Shanghai cooperation organization, which includes Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and four Central Asian states, will accept Iran, one of Moscow’s main allies in the Middle East.